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How to Destroy Your Brands?

By Paul Zhou, CEO, Illuminera Group

Marketing is
a risky business. Every year the
marketplace is littered with brands that fail miserably. Some fall from past
grace, some go belly up barely after launch. It is rare that people get to look
up and hail the glorious dawn of a blockbuster brand.

Yes,
competition is ruthless. Ever since the supermarket shelves became rows after
rows of products with little differences, the fate for most brands has been rather
dim.

Yet, is
competition really the culprit of most failures? After witnessing the rises
and, much more frequently, the falls of brands, and being personally
responsible for some of the failures and, luckily, successes, the authors
believe firmly that the answer is no. The blame is, in most cases, squarely on
marketers themselves. With so many marketing literatures and case studies
abound, it is surprising that so many failures are attributable to simple and
common pitfalls in marketing strategy making. Below are some of the more
frequently found ones:

Internal
focus vs. Consumer-centric

Consumer
centricity has been in fashion in recent years. Many consumer goods companies
installed programs and policies with the intention to ensure their staffs adopt
a consumer-centric perspective. The result? While a few probably have benefited,
the majority merely paid lip service.

Instead of
consumer-centric, many companies are actually self-centric or even
boss-centric. A major eye care brand has been languished in China and barely
scratched the surface after some twenty years in China. A peek into the
critical insight in the category quickly identified a misalignment between the
brand’s positioning strategy and the category triggers and barriers among
Chinese consumers. This finding made all the sense to the local marketing team.
But what happened afterwards? The company’s regional team simply ignored the
China team’s suggestion and dictated the strategy for yet another year.

After
entering China for five
years, a major weight management company has incurred large loses and is still searching
for the right China strategy. The company’s initial strategy of focusing on young white collar
females actually seemed to have gained traction at the beginning with customers
exhibited high satisfaction and some service centers reached break-even points.
Yet that strategy was scraped largely because the folks back in the
headquarters believed that their strategy of focusing on anyone with weight
problems back in the home market should also work in China. As such, a strategy
review and market research studies were called to assess the potential with
males, kids, and the elderly. When fresh
evidences against such a broad targeting strategy were produced, the management
simply discredited them and ordered yet another round of review and research. Now
five years in China, while competitors have flourished, the company has managed
to have a much smaller presence than before.

Fell for buzzwords

If one
spends just one night hopping from channel to channel and watching all the TV
commercials, he or she would know all the hottest buzzwords of the moment. What
are hot at this moment: organic, green, LOHAS, self-expression, …The zealot
marketers demonstrate towards buzzwords makes one wonder whether marketing
strategy has been hijacked by the latest buzz in town.

Take the
buzzword “health” as an example, a quick scan would identify the following
brands boasting about they healthiness: a fast-food chain named KFC, and a
potato chip produced by Orion.

Take the
buzzword “green” as an example, several years ago, Prince, a brand beloved by
kids and alike for its chocolaty sandwich biscuits and the Prince figure, also
went green. Prince was featured in TV
shows and PR events titled “Saving the earth with Prince!”. The results? Core brand users found it
difficult to related to the brand and other users were not given a good reason
why they should eat Prince. After several years of disappointing results, Kraft
repositioned Prince as the companion for kids, with the Prince figure
enlivening kids’ fantasy of fighting evils in cartoons and computer games. As a result Prince has been enjoying fast
growth since the change.

Wishful thinking as the strategy

It is one of
human being’s fallacies to replace reality with wishes. Companies are no
different. Very often, a desired result becomes the strategy.

Over the
years, the authors have heard many mandates when working on brand
strategy. Here are some examples:

- A
vegetable protein beverage brand dictated that whatever their new brand
strategy would look like, it would have to grab market share from milk simply
because the milk category is huge. This
decision was only changed after insights proved that milk was almost
inconvincible in its own game and that the company’s products actually appealed
to needs domains where milk did not have a role.

- A snack
company invested heavily to push their snacks onto consumer’s breakfast
table. Why? Because their category had
the lowest penetration in that usage occasion. New products subsequently
launched targeting the breakfast occasion did not perform well and in reality
might have diluted the image of the snack brand that was chosen for the
expansion into breakfast.

- It is even
more common for brand owners to demand that new products absolutely should not
cannibalize existing cash cows. Kodak certainly can be counted among the most
sincere believers of this philosophy.

Certainly
there are many other pitfalls in marketing strategy making. Yet regardless what
the pitfalls might look like, they all share the same middle name “ignorance of
the consumer truth”. In all of the cases
mentioned, failures could have been prevented if the companies simply showed a
bit more respect to consumer insights. Regardless of the symptoms, with a large
dose of consumer truth, and a small amount of common sense, many of the
marketing pitfalls can be avoided without much efforts.